


Bound For Years To Come

by Nenalata



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, Fables - Freeform, Fluff, Like Sugary Sweet, Mainly Seteth Spoilers, Married Couple, Mild character spoilers, Post-Canon, Short & Sweet, Storytelling, The Genre Is Schmoop, and their supports
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-24 21:40:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22004860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nenalata/pseuds/Nenalata
Summary: Once, there was a man who feared nothing save losing everything.Storytime at the monastery for the children of Garreg Mach means listening to Seteth read aloud from his latest collection of fables...and staring at the intricate, lively illustrations painted by his elusive, talented wife.
Relationships: Seteth/Bernadetta von Varley
Comments: 14
Kudos: 52





	Bound For Years To Come

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vethica](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vethica/gifts).



> For my beloved Vethica, close friend & confidante, one who has always believed in me, my writing, and my shameless love of making characters smooch and maybe a little more...
> 
> Here's your super-rarepair-OTP. Love you, kid.

Garreg Mach Monastery’s library seemed to hold more children than books that afternoon.

Sticky, drooling babies wriggled on frazzled parents’ laps. Jabbering schoolchildren made fast friends with their nearest peer, rapid words drowning out baby cries. Older siblings feigned boredom, casting openly impatient but subtly hopeful glances at the empty armchair at the far end of the room.

Seteth cleared his throat from the doorway, but only those sitting nearby heard, and the children in that group refused to quiet down. As he made his way through the squirming, cheerful crowd, however, a chorus of parental ‘hush’es followed him. The room settled into relative silence when he eased himself into the armchair, smiled at the small, expectant faces before him, and revealed the expensively-bound volume in his lap.

“Once,” he began, opening the book with all the solemn grandeur of an eternal vow, “there was a bear who feared nothing.”

Awed murmurs bubbled from his eager audience, and Seteth couldn’t keep the smile from his face. He gestured to the illustration on the page: a detailed painting of a ferocious bear, its maw open to snarl deadly teeth, its paws raised and ready to strike.

He understood the children’s nervous fascination. In all his years of writing fables, and in all his long _years_ , he had never seen illustrations like this. The bear roared like it was fit to claw its way off the page, each brushstroke a violent swipe of harsh brown on the vellum.

It wasn’t the bear that made him this nervous, however. Nor what fascinated him so.

It was the woman who had painted them.

“Nothing,” Seteth continued, turning the page so slowly children up front tried to peek around his chair, “save the buzzing of bumblebees.”

He turned the page again, and almost every soul in the room laughed—even a few of the most reluctant-looking parents. He didn’t need to look at the illustration to know why. That once-ferocious bear had snapped its jaws shut, a contrite, almost human expression on its now-meek face. The source of its discomfort haunted it from above: a fat, fuzzy, oblivious bumblebee buzzed at the top of the page. The bear had flattened its ears and stared at its own forehead, like its flat, painted self could catch a glimpse of its foe.

Seteth had been privy to the reference modeling of this illustration’s pose and expression. Bernadetta had spent a straight four hours merely posing in their mirror, to say nothing of how long it had taken her to draw and paint the poor beast.

_“What’s so funny? Why are you laughing? I want it to be good!”_

_“One would think you would have had plenty of practice looking terrified.”_

Once the children had properly giggled at the bear’s lifelike distress, Seteth turned the page. “A chill would go down her spine every time she heard a bumblebee’s buzz.”

Now the whole room laughed: the terrified bear had flopped onto the bottom of the page, covering its eyes with its sharp, clawed paws while the bumblebee hovered far up high.

Bernadetta had not tried out that tricky pose.

She’d made Seteth do it.

_“Maybe, but it’s not like I get to_ see _myself terrified. I only feel it. And no one else gets scared the way Bernie does.”_

_“I doubt the truth of that statement. Everyone feels afraid.”_

It wasn’t an illustration Seteth liked to look at when he was reading a fable aloud. The memory was too shameful, ridiculous, soft, and affectionate for him to keep his reading voice somber and even.

“One day,” another page turn, “the bear confided her fear in the wyvern, who only laughed.” While the children mumbled their amazement at the sight of a regal dragon whose painted scales seemed to shimmer, Seteth pitched his voice low and drawling. “’What can a bumblebee do to a great bear such as you?’ the wyvern asked the bear. ‘They can’t even sting!’”

_“Well, yeah, but...It’s different when it’s not me. It isn’t like I notice when other people get scared. They’re so much better at hiding it. Most people don’t even scream.”_

_“There are as many ways to display emotions as there are people in the world to display them.”_

“Just then,” the children oohed when Seteth turned the next page, “a butterfly fluttered under the wyvern’s wing…” Seteth paused dramatically, letting his audience take in the way the wyvern’s neck muscles stood out as it swiveled in place to look at the flashy painted butterfly, “…terrifying the wyvern beyond sense.”

_“Oh, come on, Seteth! You sound like one of your fables. You’re not afraid of anything.”_

_“Not true. I’m afraid every day.”_

Seteth turned the page, pitching his wyvern-voice higher as the library echoed with laughter again. “If it tickles my arms while I’m flying, I’ll fall to my doom!’ The wyvern flailed her limbs, flapped her wings, and it was the bear’s turn to feel entertained.”

Bernadetta’s wyvern seemed ready to burst from the book and take to the air. Its previously-sly reptilian features now had contorted into wide-eyed panic. Its forked tongue lolled out of its open jaws, and even Seteth sometimes felt he could hear its screech. The bear, a polite distance away, observed both wyvern and butterfly with its paw hiding a bearlike grin, eyes somehow glowing with mirth.

_“I’m afraid of my own loneliness. Afraid of those I’ve waited so long to love leaving me behind, as one day they must. Afraid of waking up one morning to remember you are no longer with me.”_

_“Seteth…”_

_“It must seem silly to you. Perhaps you don’t believe me. But I prefer to keep my expression calm, so that I may enjoy each day with you. That you not be forced to see my frightening scowl all the time.”_

The children calmed. The parents soothed their burbling babies. The entire room waited for Seteth to turn the page, to complete the tale, to show that final painting.

_“It doesn’t seem…silly.”_

“The moral of the story,” Seteth began, tapping his finger to the side of the last illustration of this fable. A familiar, painted woman with a shy pose explained the moral to a girl with shiny, unnatural green hair.

_“It…it_ is _silly.”_

_“I beg your pardon?”_

_“If you’re trying not to look scared, then of_ course _I have to use my own dumb faces and poses for reference!”_

“The moral of the story is: if we could see our fears as others do,” Seteth said, smiling at the enraptured faces before him, “we would realize how most of our fears are just as silly.”

_“Well—”_

_“Unless_ you _want to try out a dumb pose?”_

The audience clapped, waited for him to begin anew, and Seteth turned the page to the next delicately detailed illustration.

“A mouse ran over a wolf’s face and awakened him from a peaceful slumber…”

When the first glimmers of sunset filtered through the windows and set the stone floor outside the library aglow, the children of Garreg Mach trickled out the door and back home. Seteth was of the same mind, and he fortunately had fewer steps to take.

“How did it go? Did they like it? Did they like the scared-looking bear?” Bernadetta scrambled away from the easel the second Seteth opened the door to their quarters. She beamed up at him, and he kissed her forehead right next to a splotch of dried green pigment.

“They loved every single page.”

Bernadetta giggled. “Oh, no,” she insisted, waving her paint-smeared hands. “Your book’s too long for everyone to notice _all_ my pictures.”

“I promise you it’s true.”

And it was.

But they’d loved the scared-looking bear a little too much for Seteth’s pride to admit quite yet.


End file.
